Mar
31
Did you know that sometimes just moving a speaker a few inches one way or another can improve the sound quality? We’re talking about an improvement that could surpass the difference you’d gain from moving up to a higher end receiver. Not only is this sort of sonic sleight-of-hand possible I’ve demonstrated it to dumbfounded on-lookers, I even stopped one naysayer mid-sentence and made a believer of him about the importance of proper room acoustics.
It really just boils down to this, if your room suffers from poor acoustics and your speakers aren’t in their optimal placement in the room, you’re never going to be able to correct that by trying to spend your way out of the problem. Sure you may see some incremental improvement in a poor room but time and time again I’ve seen mediocre gear outperform high-end gear in a properly set-up/treated room, of course that same high-end gear would perform even better in the “right room”.
I look back on my introduction to room acoustics as one of the most important events in my eventual understanding of what makes a real home theater tick. Display quality is ever changing; it’s a moving target, nothing wrong with that it’s just the nature of the beast. High end sound on the other hand is a little more stable and barring advancements like TrueHD and PCM audio from Blu-ray dare I say, almost dependable. But of course just because home theater sound doesn’t change as often as video, don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s easier to master and reproduce from room to room.
Mar
14
This post may not score me any points with my custom installer friends but I’m not here for their benefit, I’m here to make sure you get the best theater possible for your hard earned dollar. For those of you considering going with professional installation for your home theater needs, get a line item (itemized) proposal, without one you’re just comparing apples to oranges.
There are several different formats for custom home theater proposals, I’ll try to be brief by describing the three most common. The first is the “value added” breakdown but about the only person getting any extra added value out of this one is the integrator. In these proposals you’ll see a brief description of the equipment going into each room and sub-total for that particular room, if I were shopping for a custom home theater I’d reject this type of proposal out of hand.
This type of proposal reduces the process into an A la carte endeavor and in all honesty it’s a potential sign of a lazy integrator. Don’t want this? Ok we’ll scratch it off, want to add another room? Just double the price of that last room. This type of proposal might be ok for a few rooms of multi-room audio but the underlying problem remains, we really have no idea what we’re paying for each item, just the bottom line price for the room.
The next type of proposal is often called a “detailed” proposal and when compared to the value added proposal it certainly is an improvement but still not quite what we’re looking for. Detailed proposals list most of the individual pieces of gear in any given room, and often times the major accessories, but rarely do they detail things as small as cables, rack components or individual speakers.
Mar
1
Build Your Own DVD Server
Filed Under Media Servers (HTPC) | Leave a Comment
As Blu-ray grows in popularity (at least among home theater enthusiasts) many of us have thought about consolidating our DVD collections to make room for more of those little blue boxes on our shelves. You might consider a DVD server as a way to streamline that process; I made the switch a few years ago and have never looked back.
Even those reluctant to travel down the full-fledged HTPC path, due the cost and complexity, may find a DVD server a viable solution. The great thing about a (standard definition) DVD only server is that the technical requirements and most importantly the cost can be kept quite low, at least compared with HDTV capable media servers.
I’ll bet many of you even have an old PC or enough parts to get started, at the bottom of some closet right now. About the only thing you would need to add to a vanilla PC to get it up to DVD server status is a sound card or USB adapter 
Programs like My Movies or Media Browser give you the slick user interface that really ties it altogether. And again, since we’re ripping the movies to the internal (or networked for that matter) hard drive; no need to locate them on the shelf, pop them into the player and then return them back to the shelf afterwards, the movie starts when you press play.